In general, if you want to manufacture and sell a new car in the United States, it has to be crash-tested. For small or boutique automakers, this can be somewhat troublesome. If you’re making just 25 cars—like Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus—the cost per unit is high, and the financial impact can be pretty severe. As a result, it’s pretty hard to watch.
It’s all in the name of safety, of course, but seeing an ultra-rare 004S from SCG hit the wall at 30 miles per hour is a tad more painful than watching the airbags deploy in a Honda Civic. It’s an unfortunate reality. At least they didn’t bother painting it first.
The footage from the crash test was posted to AMMO NYC’s YouTube channel. For those who don’t know, AMMO NYC is run by Larry Kosilla, a world-renowned automotive detailer if there ever was one. This test car was sent to him before it was crash tested in order to be cleaned and to try out a few finishes for the car’s exposed carbon-fiber body panels.
Since the car was going to be crashed, there wasn’t any pressure to get it right the first time, which allowed Kosilla to try a variety of finishing methods to get the right shine. For those who are curious, it turns out that polishing carbon fiber with regular sandpaper is the best option. Kosilla starts at 320-grit and eventually ends up at 2,000-grit, wet-sanding when necessary. The resulting finish is excellent, but anybody whose done any polishing like that knows it’s very time-consuming. Anyway, back to the crash test.
Much of the front end of the car gets pretty wrecked—obviously—but it’s claimed that repairs are indeed possible, which is surprising. You can see all of the preparation that needs to be done before such a test as well—lots of sensors, lots of cameras, and lots of stickers. For those who are wondering, yes, the car passed the test.
And, by boutique supercar standards, it didn’t even come at much of a cost. Powered by a 650-horsepower Chevrolet LT4 V8, the SCG 004S is set to retail at $460,000. Sure, it would’ve been nice if this was a Corolla or something instead, but at least it’s not a priceless one-off. It’s also interesting that SCG figured out a way to do all of this testing with a single car so there won’t be a fleet of vehicles ruined as a result of ensuring its occupant’s safety.
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